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Would You Like Fries With That Game?

Philip
Oliver makes up half of the UK’s famous Spectrum
design masters, the Oliver Twins, originally known for the Dizzy line
of games. Now heading up Blitz Games, Philip Oliver recently came
into a deal with Burger King to do three Xbox/Xbox 360 titles as
promotional tools for the company. Gamasutra spoke with Oliver
about the deal, Blitz’s future work in next-gen, the company’s
new Blitz Arcade initiative, and investigated the reasons why we
haven’t seen a new Dizzy game in years. We also
snuck in some vegetarian propaganda while we were at it.

Gamasutra: Who proposed the Burger King deal?

Philip Oliver: Well, I think Burger King obviously has been looking
at the fact that they’re trying to connect with today’s
youth, and that means gamers, fundamentally. Certainly they’re
not after the sub-ten-year-olds, because the competition does that,
without mentioning any names. But they want to get the 12-18 or
20 year olds, and those people play video games, and that’s
cool and that’s trendy and that’s where they want to
spend their advertising money - hence doing things like Fight
Night. So they were already active in this market, basically
just trying to be more in this area. So that’s one end.

We at the other end were talking to Microsoft, saying we’d
like to do something like Fusion Frenzy again. And ideally
it would’ve been Fusion Frenzy itself, but Hudson
Soft nipped it and took the license from Microsoft, which was like,
'hmmm. That was our game! Not sure if that’s right.'

GS: Yeah, I was a little confused about that.

PO: So were we! We said, 'that’s our game, if you’re
going to make it, you’ve got to make it with us!' But we
went back and checked the contract, and they do own the IP. We
completely created that thing from scratch, from just a brief document
that said ‘can you make us a party game for mature gamers,
sort of 18+’and that’s what we did for Microsoft, and
it did pretty well. But it was a work for hire, which means they
do own the IP, which means if they want to go and license it to
Hudson Soft, they can, but it was a bit of a shame because we’d
have loved to have done the next one.

But anyway, we were talking to them about the fact it was a bit
of a shame we weren’t getting to do this, and we really wanted
to do another party-style game. We were talking to (Xbox Live Arcade
portfolio manager) Ross Erickson and he said his new role in life
was Live Arcade, and basically that that would fit perfectly. So,
we were having lots of conversations with him, and he came over
to visit our studio because we said we were going to get into Live
Arcade in a big way, and then during out conversation we said ‘well
who funds this?’We’re an independent developer, and
we need funding! And he said ‘yeah, well the problem is the
Live Arcade division doesn’t have a lot of money to give
out for funding.’So we said what about advertisers? Are their
advertisers out there who would like to get product placement within
video games? He said there might be, and that he’d look out
for us.

A week or two later, he gave us a call and said ‘we’ve
just had Burger King in touch with us, saying they’d like
to fund some games, and they’ve come to me in Live Arcade,
and feel they’re not going to be the size of Halo or Project
Gotham or something, and in fact it links up well with Live –do
you guys want to talk to them?’

So that’s kind of where it started, and it sounded like
a pretty good idea. It started as Xbox Live Arcade games, just
for the 360, and we bought into that. Three games, Live Arcade,
they’d get some good product placement, we’d get some
good games out on the system, and it’d be great. It got more
interesting as time went along, because we started committing people
to the project, and time was moving on, and we started getting
to seven months, which eventually fell to six months, when they
started saying ‘we want them to be boxed games!’Well,
more accurately, they said they wanted them to be Xbox games as
well.

So we said, hang on a minute, that doesn’t work with Xbox
Live Arcade, and they said “we’ll just put them in
a box. ”That makes sure they have to walk into the store,
they can’t just pull it off the Xbox Live service, they actually
have to come in-store. And we said ‘surely that’s a
problem, cost of goods and everything,’ and they said ‘we
have a good history with Microsoft, we can work out a deal with
them, and we may as well put the 360 and Xbox games on the same
disc!’ And we said ‘this sounds quite scary now, because
you’re going to ask us for much bigger games!’ Well,
that came next (laughs).

So at this point we were committed, and we had fifteen or twenty
people at this point into it, working on the designs for 360. We
were quite into it, then they upped the size of the contract, so
they raised the budget, and we raised the team size considerably.
We got up to about 60 people in all.

GS: Wow.

PO: And we wound up pumping out something good –even though
at times we thought, ‘Jesus, what have we got ourselves into,
this is tough.’We managed to get an extra month out of them,
because we thought it was just too challenging, and just too tight.
We got another month out of them by Microsoft basically agreeing
to fast-track them through their QA process, so that was good,
and helpful. But we still had to effectively do three original
games, two SKUs of each, in seven months. Scary, but we did it!
They’re all mastered, they’re all in production, and
there’s going to be two million units of each disc.